Post-turkey post

Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, those of you who celebrated it (and weren't at my house). For the rest of you, hope you had a nice week and I'll be checking in with you soon.

My much-needed mini-vacation went very well. Family and practically-family came over for turkey on Thursday, with leftovers devoured Friday in the traditional day-after feast for friends. My sister came home from school (again) and was actually in the house much of the time. We played with a Graveyard Duel Lego set care of synn -- put Harry in the cauldron and made Lucius, Draco, Voldemort and Snape dance in a circle around him. (Snape couldn't blow his cover in front of them, you know, and a not insignificant part of him would be tempted to let the kid burn.)

Met up with a school buddy and two of his friends in NYC on Saturday. We went to the Frick Museum -- not thrilled, to be honest; that is, he had an impressive collection for one man, but most of it wasn't my taste. There's something about that 17th-c. portrait and still-life style that unsettles me: how everyone looks white-and-pink-fleshy, half sticky and half as though they've just stepped out of a milk bath, and the way the pearls and grapes look hard, blurry, translucent, with the streak of white for shine. I haven't yet been able to pinpoint or precisely describe what it is I don't like about it. Anyway, I was fond of a small bronze figure of Mercury holding Argus' head, a painting of a long-haired girl kneeling in front of her tutor and holding her hand to a candle so her fingers were translucent, and a couple of other paintings. We walked through in under an hour.

Wandered down Madison Ave. and discovered glorious window displays: one of a grotesque royal family (think Nixon in Phil Collins' music video for "Land of Confusion," if you've seen that) with Charles in garters in a bathtub, Blair wearing an HRH crown, and a photo of William glaring at the back of Camilla's head; and one in all grays, Tim Burton-style, of Marie Antoinette with a papier-mache head, dusty wig and huge gauzy skirt under which were lighted mannequin heads and cake box covers. Popped in to F.A.O. Schwartz (where we found a life-sized plush giraffe on sale for $10,000) at the request of one of his friends, who is a fellow American Ballet Theatre fan and therefore was allowed to lead me wherever she pleased, at least until she suggested watching the "laser show" on the ceiling of Grand Central Station which turned out to be a mercifully brief horrorshow of flickering, semi-animated constellations with a halfhearted ski jump, mistletoe and script "Season's Greetings from the MTA." Dinner at a Peruvian restaurant in the East Village (my, don't we sound cultured) and a highly unnecessary dessert at Veniero's bakery up the street, which will for ever & always sound like "venereal disease" and so be too disturbing to fully enjoy its products.

Other than that there was much of the television watching, if by television we can mean episodes on DVD or videotape, namely House, Firefly, Buffy and Star Trek. Also The Queen of the Damned on a whim of synn's. Pretty much the only fandom left untouched was Harry Potter -- despite twice being invited to see the movie again -- although I did read a fic by Jaida ("The End of That") when she announced that she'd archived her work and chosen a few favorites, and am printing two of Sam's 250-page magnum opuses (magni opi?) tomorrow for future enjoyment.

The nice thing about all this is that because no day was spent immersed in any particular fandom or form (e.g. no triple-feature Buffies or six hours reading articles), and because social activities broke up the reading and watching, it didn't result in that awful feeling of having wasted the weekend. Rather, it was relaxing and enjoyable and felt like revisiting old friends -- House and Wilson at Christmas, Simon watching River join the dance at the town fair, Q taunting Picard and Vash, Vincent Perez living it up as Fey!Marius, Willow and Giles fighting while newly-chipped Spike sits tied to a chair. Plus there was the traditional Peanuts Thanksgiving special.

It was also an excellent weekend for reading. Worked on the journal bibliography and made it through another stack of fandom and fan fiction articles (Salmon & Symons' "Slash Fiction and Human Mating Psychology" is one of my new favorites), and Henry Jenkins' infamous Textual Poachers finally arrived in the mail. Having suddenly remembered the concept of reading for pleasure, I re-read A Separate Peace on the train to and from NYC on Saturday (still good -- more on this soon), and today am most of the way through The Phantom of the Opera.

Have been sorry to discover that Raoul is as whiny in the book as he was in the show, with an extra helping of immature volatility. Within a page, his musings will go like this: He loves his blue-eyed angel, his soul-mate, his perfect, tragically victimized, innocent Christine -- no, he hates the double-crossing, coy she-devil, stringing him along while conducting secret rendezvous with what must be her lover -- he must rescue her immediately from the fiend -- no, he should let her go with him as punishment for her duplicity.... I think the author, Leroux, may be having fun with him, or else time and culture have changed reader interpretation since 1910 and Raoul now makes for one petulant, ridiculous, mostly unsympathetic hero. The Phantom is also more vampiric than even the musical insinuated -- he sleeps in a coffin, looks like a skeleton, smells of death, is cold to the touch, is only glimpsed at night, lacks definite corporeality -- and in the tradition of Dracula, less fleshed out. The abduction was described after the fact in an extended monologue, also in the vein (ha ha) of Dracula and the Vampire Chronicles. We'll see about the final confrontation.